For millennia, El Paso del Norte has served as one of North America’s most enduring crossroads. On the Rio Grande’s run of 1,800 miles out of southern Colorado, El Paso del Norte marks the spot where mountain ranges on either side of the river shift its flow eastward toward the Gulf of Mexico. That quirk of geography has made this particular segment of the Rio Grande a traditional focal point for those seeking to cross the vast Chihuahuan Desert; the mountains around El Paso del Norte serve as a clear marker to weary travelers of where they’ll find a verdant oasis, a place of sustenance, and a chance to continue onward.

The earliest signs of humanity on the continent— fossilized footprints dating back 20,000 years—were discovered just 100 miles from El Paso del Norte, in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park. In the pre-Columbian era, the Jornada Mogollon peoples lived on either side of the Rio Grande, with El Paso del Norte serving as a gateway between the settlements scattered across what’s now West Texas and Paquimé, an elaborate adobe city in northern Mexico. Today, that space is occupied by the twin cities of El Paso and Juárez, with 2.5 million people packed between the Franklin Mountains on the northern bank and Cerro Bola to the south.

Europeans didn’t arrive at El Paso del Norte until 1598, when the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate led a column of 500 Spaniards north out of the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental. His force was meant to both settle and subdue the Puebloan peoples, whom Francisco Vázquez de Coronado had met 40 years earlier on the first organized European expedition through the region that is now New Mexico. But even with 83 wagons of provisions (cows, sheep, 18 barrels of gunpowder), Oñate’s party was unprepared for the arduous traversal of the Chihuahuan Desert. Four months into the journey and 300 miles from any known settlement, they came close to running out of water. By the time Oñate’s scouts finally stumbled onto the banks of the Rio Grande at El Paso del Norte, they were so desperate that, as one later remembered, “our men, consumed by the burning thirst, their tongues swollen and parched, threw themselves into the water and drank as though the entire river did not carry enough to quench their terrible thirst.”

After recovering at the river’s edge, Oñate continued north to establish the colony of New Mexico. The first mission church in El Paso del Norte wasn’t established for several decades, a minute outpost of Catholicism that became a city almost overnight in 1680, after the Puebloan peoples revolted against Spanish rule. As Puebloans across New Mexico burned the churches that had been forced into their villages and laid siege to the ostensible capital of the colony, Santa Fe, some 3,000 refugees fled south along the Rio Grande, finding sanctuary in El Paso.

While the Spanish managed to reconquer Santa Fe and the rest of New Mexico a dozen years later, El Paso now rivaled the territorial capital as the empire’s most important northern outpost. The lush banks of the Rio Grande were filled with vineyards making wine destined for Mexico City and Madrid, while a sizable military presence guarded the trade route between Santa Fe and Ciudad Chihuahua from Comanche and Apache raiders. In the centuries that followed, El Paso’s strategic location would continue to make it vital to economic and military affairs, a region contested and at times claimed by the United States, Spain, and Mexico.

After the victory of the US in the Mexican-American War in 1848, the original El Paso remained Mexican because it was south of the river, while Anglos rushed in to build a new city on the north bank, mirroring the original so closely that it kept the same name. American El Paso became the main base of operations for the Confederacy’s failed effort to seize New Mexico and then, in the decades after the Civil War, the US Army’s headquarters in its generational battle to subjugate the Apache.

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Once the city had emerged from this crucible of warfare in the 1880s, the arrival of the railroad reasserted it as a nexus of trade. Serving as a connection between Mexico and the interior of the United States as well as the midway point on the most reliable transcontinental route, El Paso boomed. For a time, it was the “Queen City of the Southwest,” a bustling industrial center where Hollywood stars passing through on the Union Pacific would lay over in the first Hilton Hotel, many walking across the nearby bridge for a taste of nightlife in Mexican El Paso, now renamed in honor of the liberal reformer Benito Juárez.

Today’s El Paso fails to conjure up a similar sense of glamour. Though still an important trade hub, the city is among the poorest of its size in the country, its only economic lifeline the massive Fort Bliss, a military complex that accounts for roughly one out of every three jobs there. Most disturbingly, the Rio Grande is no longer a point of connection between peoples but instead a concrete ditch walled off by concertina wire. Juárez is even worse off, still recovering from a decade-long war among drug cartels that made it the murder capital of the world.

For good and for ill, El Paso del Norte has always played an outsize role in the continent’s economic and geopolitical life, one that extends far beyond the borderlands. So what can we learn from it? The late journalist Richard Parker tries to answer that question in The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story, a tender biography of his often-overlooked hometown. Calling El Paso “the unacknowledged cradle of American history,” Parker focuses on the flexible multiculturalism of El Paso; he argues that its heritage as a Spanish settlement represents a better foundation for understanding contemporary America than the unyielding racial hierarchy of the English colonies.

“El Paso,” Parker writes, “is where Native, Spanish, European, African, Jewish, and Arab cultures fought, bled, died, and forged ties, including intermarriage: this vibrantly diverse culture paved the way for our melting-pot nation and serves as a model for an America ever torn over race, ethnicity, and religion.”

The Crossing was written before the 2024 election, when Donald Trump won a larger share of Hispanic voters than any Republican since George W. Bush, with Black and Asian Americans likewise trending to the right. El Paso itself, which is over 80 percent Hispanic, was no exception: More of its residents voted Republican last year than in any other election since the early 2000s.

Reconciling this split-screen view of the Southwest—one of the nation’s most diverse regions on the one hand and fertile ground for Trumpism on the other—through the story of El Paso means interrogating how the city’s demographic and economic histories intertwined to produce today’s desert metropolis. If the counterintuitive political realignment of the US is visible anywhere, it’s in this city of stark sunlight and unembellished mountains, a place, as the novelist Dagoberto Gilb put it, where the truth is “not beauty-parlored well enough.”

Richard Parker’s account of El Paso’s history features a bold-faced division between the colonial era and the American conquest. The city, like the rest of Spain’s colonies, was deeply informed by the cultural intermingling between Europeans and Indigenous peoples that was promoted by the crown, but things changed after 1848, when Mexico ceded what would become the American Southwest to the invading United States. Between the brutality of the Apache Wars and “the surge of new American whites” seeking their fortunes after the Mexican-American War, Parker writes, “the Americans had now infected the Southwest with a disease at least as bad as the smallpox the Europeans had brought: racism.”

Parker proudly recounts that El Paso elected a Jewish mayor in 1880, but he turns regretful in relating that, afterward, “the ways of the old Confederacy were steadily imported into American El Paso, and a large divide opened between people of Mexican origin north of the river and the white merchant class that steadily abandoned its riverbanks for a series of hills above.” Schools, public accommodations, and housing in this new, Anglo-dominated version of El Paso were segregated, with Black and Mexican Americans denied voting rights and thus any say in the city’s affairs.

This suppression of non-whites in American El Paso mirrored the trend throughout the vast landscape the United States seized from Mexico, with Anglos striving to enforce racial hierarchies in cities from Albuquerque to Los Angeles that were initially populated by Spanish speakers and Native Americans. At the same time, the notion that bigotry was a novel concept in the Southwest is a far too charitable interpretation of the region’s history, given that Spanish colonial culture was structured according to its own racial caste system.

In confronting the complexities of Spanish colonial history, Parker alludes to the strict differentiation between Spanish-born settlers and criollos like Don Juan de Oñate, nobles born and raised in the New World. Both classes did indeed intermarry with their Indigenous subjects, but even after the majority of New Spain’s people were mestizos, colorism became pervasive—as it still is throughout Latin America.

And while English-style chattel slavery was nonexistent in colonial New Mexico, it was nevertheless commonplace for slave raiders to kidnap Native American children and sell them into indentured servitude to wealthy landowners. The Puebloans, Diné, Apache, Utes, and Comanche who had been ripped away from their birth communities became an entirely separate class known as genízaros, both cordoned off from existing Spanish settlements and held separate from their tribes. Bias against genízaros was so acute that freed members of the caste were forced to establish their own villages outside the mainstream of colonial society. These towns—Belen, Abiquiú, Las Trampas—still dot the map of New Mexico.

Parker places far less emphasis on these unbecoming facets of the Southwest’s history than he does on the civil rights victories El Pasoans won in the 20th century. In particular, he joins the historian David Dorado Romo in celebrating the legacy of Carmelita Torres, a 17-year-old from Juárez who led a rebellion in 1917. Torres was protesting the dehumanizing treatment she and other female commuters were subjected to by US Customs officers every morning as they crossed the bridge to their jobs in El Paso. After an officer ordered Torres to strip naked so that he could “disinfect her” by dousing her body with gasoline, “she enlisted 30 other women waiting to cross to demonstrate against the U.S. officers.” By noon, the impromptu protest had grown to include thousands of women. The rebellion went on for days, forcing Customs to curtail the practice. In this early flash point in the politicization of the division between El Paso and Juárez, Parker sees proof that “the newest Anglos seemed unable to understand or accept living in what had been—until the Mexican-American War, the forty-niners, and the railroad—a racially and ethnically diverse region.”

El Paso has numerous such milestones to boast of, from being the first school system in Texas to desegregate to the election of Raymond Telles as the first Hispanic mayor of a major American city in 1957. Parker contends that this history is indicative of the Southwest’s inherent tendency toward open-mindedness and tolerance. El Paso, in his telling, provides a guide for how America can rescue itself from the current political morass, wherein “half of the population of the world’s longest-running democracy insists that it be governed by whites, for whites.” How, then, to explain the disconnect between this faith in the Southwest’s demographics and the region’s drift toward nativism?

Parker himself was born to a white father and a Mexican mother, who met in Monterrey and married in Mexico City before settling in El Paso. No stranger to the intricacies of Southwestern identity politics, he writes in The Crossing of how class divides and questions of national origin have perpetuated the caste system of the colonial era. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929, drew “a sharp distinction between American citizens and imported Mexican labor,” Parker writes. The GI Forum, an organization established to advocate for Hispanic veterans after World War II, was even more avowedly anti-immigrant, joining the Texas State Federation of Labor to publish a vicious pamphlet titled What Price Wetbacks? that agitated for an end to the guest farmworker program that Franklin D. Roosevelt had brokered during the war.

Issued in 1954, the GI Forum pamphlet has an introduction that reads like a 21st-century screed:

We, as Texas citizens of the United States, living in the midst of the disrupted economy of the border area, seeing wetbacks daily, watching our neighbors depart on their annual migration as a result of the wetback invasion, decided to make a report to the American people on what we saw happening around us.… they actually are a threat to our health, our economy, our American way of life.

The American tendency to castigate immigrants for society’s ills has led to diatribes like this one throughout our history.

If El Paso and the rest of the Southwest can guide us toward a more promising future, it will not be by rebutting white supremacy through sheer demographic weight but rather by addressing the lived conditions of any person who feels they’ve been left behind by the globalized economy.

A question that has often preoccupied previous chroniclers of El Paso is how to explain the city’s crashing fortunes in the postwar era, as the onetime economic capital of the Southwest became among the most impoverished cities in the nation. W.H. Timmons, writing in the 1980s, noted the establishment of a civic development council that hoped to propel El Paso into the same stratum as Phoenix. “To reach its potential,” Timmons wrote, El Paso “must seek and acquire new industry.”

A half-century later, that goal remains elusive. Today, many in El Paso blame their plight on NAFTA, which dragged tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs out of the city, including just across the Rio Grande to Juárez. Even if it was possible for a laid-off El Pasoan to find employment at a maquiladora in Mexico, it always came with a steep pay cut. Put simply, Parker writes, “trade left little on the table for El Paso.” A cruel irony indeed for a city that had previously only benefited from its position at the crux of multinational commerce.

Parker died shortly after The Crossing was published. Since then, the book has taken on a feeling of legacy, representing both a fitting memorial to Parker’s extraordinary journalism career and his dogged love for El Paso. He, like so many Southwesterners, left home to search for opportunity, finding it as a foreign correspondent reporting from war zones in Latin American, the Balkans, and the Middle East. When Parker returned to El Paso on a reporting trip in 2018, he found it “a blue-collar, tattooed town, where trucks and trains rumbled north and south all day and night, against a skyline that was more refinery and railyard than skyscraper and green space.” All told, “El Paso had among the highest illiteracy rates in America, the crummiest health care, and the most epic poverty.”

Parker’s relationship to the city—inflected in equal measure with pride and grief—is made manifest in The Crossing’s final chapter, which chronicles the 23 El Pasoans and Juárenses who were murdered by a mass shooter in 2019. The perpetrator was a white supremacist from a community near Dallas who, obsessed with the Great Replacement theory, had driven to El Paso with the express purpose of killing Mexican Americans. Parker happened to be home at the time and rushed over to the Cielo Vista Walmart to cover the aftermath. “When would the diseased cruelty of my country ever end?” Parker wrote. “We created El Paso and the Southwest out of thin air, after shedding an enormous amount of blood. And now it was polluted by the sickening, twisted, and deadly racial politics of someplace else.”

Though Parker casts animus and white supremacy as foreign invaders of his open-minded hometown elsewhere in The Crossing, here he acknowledges that the racial politics of El Paso, and by extension the entire Southwest, are often more ambiguous. A few pages after astutely observing, “Trump didn’t invent anti-Hispanic hatred, but he weaponized it more effectively than any American politician in history,” Parker notes that at least one of the Walmart victims was a Hispanic Trump fan.

Such facts are unsettling, but they must be wrestled with if Americans are ever to make peace with our enigmatic multiculturalism. Political preferences and racial identity do not always align, and neither do diversity and acceptance. El Paso’s history, like that of the entire region, encapsulates the slipperiness of identity. On the one hand, a place of such profound heterogeneity can foster intermingling and mutual understanding; on the other, there are ever more divisions for malignant forces to exploit.

Undergirding all of those countervailing dynamics in the geographic reality of El Paso del Norte is the problem that it is exposed, more than most nodes in the global network of trade, to the market’s shifting whims. El Paso gradually adjusted to the era of free trade by returning to its roots as a shipping center. By 2022, some $25.6 billion in goods were being processed through its port of entry. But as Trumpian protectionism takes hold, El Paso again finds itself searching for answers. By one estimate, a reimposition of a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico could cost the US over 1 million jobs. It’s clear that, just as when America loosened its trade practices a half century ago, the toll of reversing those policies will fall disproportionately on El Paso.

If the Southwest is a model for the rest of the country, its demographic profile is only part of the story. At the same time we celebrate the diversity of America, we must contend with the damage wrought by decades of trade policies written by and for big business. What would happen if working-class El Pasoans celebrated their hometown as more than just another link in the supply chain? There’s no better place than the center of the border between America and our closest trading partner for laborers to reclaim their homeland’s historic status as a hub of human connection, regardless of what box they check on the census form.